The Lexx UScon Recon Mission – Report

I have a couple of things to add….

When I originally intended to go to DragonCon 2002, my sole purpose was to see Mike Nelson and Kevin Murphy of TV’s [i]Mystery Science Theater 3000[/i]. Lucky for me, it turned into a fun [i]Lexx[/i] gathering for me and my fellow online fans. During most of the weekend, I spent most of my time hanging out with them and I had a blast. It wasn’t until the Masquerade did I remember that Mike and Kevin were the original reason for my attendance. And there they were up on stage, being the masters of ceremonies for the Masquerade. We could observe the events onstage from backstage via closed-circuit television. Unfortunately, we could not hear anything that was being said! Next to me was a fellow contestant. She asked, “Who are those guys?” I explained that they were the guys from [i]MST3K[/i]. “Oh my Gawd! They’re going to make fun of our costumes!” I reassured her that they are actually very nice guys and I was right about that. I would have loved to have heard what they said about our little “act.” All I heard was the tail end of an amusing comment about “clusterlizards.”

Also, there’s something that needs to be emphasized about the Masquerade. This event is the climax of the entire DragonCon experience. There was a fire marshal on hand as well as police. This event is so huge that it was simply impossible to let everyone into the auditorium. After a certain point, they could not permit any more people in there. Then subsequently, they closed off the floor where the Masquerade was being held because of the massive number of people. After the show was over, we had to “run the Gauntlet.” Each group of contestestants followed a one hundred meter cordened-off walk the started from the backstage entrance all the was up to the end of the escalators into the lobby. It was lined with hundreds upon hundreds of people lined up at least five-deep and all of them were flashing pictures. Periodically along the walk, X’s were marked with masking tape to indicate where each group should stop and pose for cameras. We felt like movie stars. And that last little bit of fun convinced us that we needed to do this again next year.

(For everyone’s information, it may be possible to obtain a videotaped copy of the Masquerade. I sent the folks at DragonCon a simple email asking about this. And the reply was that they were trying to work on this. So have patience. I might be able to provide an online videoclip of our Masquerade performance!)